"Life Is Strange" might be my favorite song from FEAR, especially since it gives off vehemently strong The Family Jewels vibes. The song legitimately sounds like it could easily belong on that album, and MARINA's manager even brings that up in this recent Q&A session that was held from YouTube space. (MARINA also says during this session that the song's opening lines about knowing "so many boys and girls" is in reference to diamonds, her fans.) There are multiple reasons why "Life Is Strange" reminds fans of The Family Jewels. One is that, as MARINA herself states in that aforementioned Q&A session, "Life Is Strange" features a "jaunty chorus" like many of the songs from The Family Jewels do. (Here's looking at you, "Girls," "Oh No!," "Hollywood," etc.) Another reason is that the lyrical content of the song, especially the lyrics of the chorus, is similar to a lot of the lyrical content found on The Family Jewels. In the chorus of "Life Is Strange," Diamandis sings, "Don't know what I'm doing with my life, but maybe there's no wrong or right," and this reminds me of the choruses of The Family Jewels songs like "Mowgli's Road" and "Oh No!." MARINA also alludes to "Mowgli's Road" in the song when she sings in the second verse, "Is it ever gonna be enough to love another and be loved?" which is a direct reference to this line from "Mowgli's Road": "Do you think you will be good enough to love others and to be loved?" The third song from FEAR is simply titled "You," and while I by no means hate it, it's one of the weaker tracks on FEAR and even from LOVE + FEAR overall. The song reminds me lyrically of the song "Hypocrates" from Electra Heart, as both songs seem to be about someone who is full of themselves and ready to judge the speaker of the song despite their own flaws. It even calls back to a line in "Hypocrates": "I know you only want to own me, and that's the kind of love you show me." In "You," MARINA sings, "You don't own me, but I can cut you loose." "You" also seems to allude to one of my favorite MARINA songs of all time - "Buy the Stars" which is also from the Electra Heart era. In "Buy the Stars," MARINA sings, "Still, you'd like to think you own me... You know only how to own me...," It's possible that all three songs were written about the same person, although I have seen some fans speculate that the target of "You" isn't another person but MARINA herself - the one of her past trying to hold her back from being the best version of herself that she can be (something that most of us can probably understand and relate to), which is plausible. I like "You" a lot more than I did when I first heard it as it has grown on me, but I overall find it to be a catchy but rather mediocre pop song compared to the more alternative songs on LOVE + FEAR like "To Be Human" (which is a masterpiece), "End of the Earth," and "Life Is Strange."
I really like "Karma," the fourth song from FEAR, especially since, like "Life Is Strange," the melody is playful and cheerful, and it apparently underwent a major change between its demo version and final version, as MARINA said on Instagram recently that it originally sounded like a '90s boy band song. (I hope that that version leaks because I would love to hear it.) There is, however, one aspect of the song that disappoints me somewhat. According to the MARINA Wiki, the song "is about the systematic misogyny and sexual abuse employed by powerful figures in the media," something that I read long before FEAR was even released. Reading this really excited me because I love it when music gets political and tackles important issues that are affecting the world today. (That's one of the reasons why "To Be Human" is my favorite song from LOVE + FEAR.) I was also excited because you cannot discuss powerful figures employing misogyny and sexual abuse without discussing current POTUS Donald Trump, and even though the results of the 2016 presidential election devastated me, I was happy to see art responding to it. (Media such as American Horror Story: Cult, Otep's album Kult 45, and a couple of songs on Lana Del Rey's Lust for Life album are just a few examples of works that tackled the state of the world as a result of the election.) Although Diamandis is not American, (a) she responded to it nonetheless such as when she addressed it on Twitter, (b) such a thing definitely impacts many parts of the world, not just the United States of America, and (c) she has addressed American issues in her music in the past, such as the state of American fame in "Hollywood," the Boston Marathon bombing in "Savages," and the relatively recent wave of riots in "To Be Human." "Karma," however, does not address what I believed that it would in a direct manner, not like "Savages" does. It does so in a seemingly safe and abstract manner, a manner in which the lyrics could be interpreted in different ways. You would, in fact, likely only recognize that the song is about what it is if you knew that it was; otherwise, you would likely interpret it as being about someone whom the speaker personally knows, someone such as an ex-lover: "Real hearts don't lie," MARINA instructs in the song's bridge. "Take it from me. (I know.) You'll see in time. Take it from me." The song is extremely catchy and fun to listen to, but I just feel very let down by its lack of brutal honesty. (That sense of brutal honesty and humorous cynicism found in songs like "Savages," "Sex Yeah," "Scab & Plaster," "Obsessions," "Hollywood," and so forth is, in fact, missing from LOVE + FEAR overall, which is probably the main reason why I would say that it's my least favorite MARINA album so far.)
Next on FEAR is "Emotional Machine," which MARINA first performed last fall at the Neon Gold X festival. The song was co-written by (and features background vocals by) Broods, and a part of its instrumental is featured in the LOVE + FEAR album trailer. When I first saw the album trailer, I wasn't really thinking about that performance (which I had initially seen and heard in very poor quality as it was), but the instrumental reminded me a lot of Electra Heart, and I have seen fans say that "Emotional Machine" reminds them of Electra Heart. The song starts off very softly with the instrumentation that you hear in the album trailer, but it quickly picks up speed and volume and becomes an upbeat bop. It isn't necessarily a highlight for me, but I appreciate its soaring chorus and Electra Heart vibes. The lyrics admittedly confuse me a bit because she sings in the chorus, "Since I was a teen, cut my feelings off clean," and the song does seem to be about putting guards up to protect yourself from hurt, but if you cut yourself off from feelings, then how can you be an emotional machine, and since when are machines emotional? Is that the point? Is the song title meant to be an oxymoron? On an unrelated note, though, her reference to cutting her feelings off as a teen reminds me of "Teen Idle," another reason why the song reminds me a bit of Electra Heart. The album then gives us "Too Afraid," obviously appropriately placed on the FEAR half of the album. The song's piano accompaniment reminds me of Troye Sivan's song "Postcard" from his Bloom album, and I checked to see if the two songs share any songwriters (since some songs - such as "True" and "My My My!" as an example - do), but they do not. The song is pretty slow and lyrically speaks of being afraid of change and bettering yourself: "I want to change, but I don't know how," she sings in her opening verse. "I've been trying to turn my life around." LOVE + FEAR's penultimate song is "No More Suckers," an upbeat and playful song about making the decision to no longer allow people to take advantage of you: "I was too open, I was too quick to let other people in, took whatever they could get. Now I see a pattern; I'm getting rid of it." I love the song's catchy and melodically powerful chorus, but there is one aspect of the song that I don't like. In the song's second verse, MARINA sings, "When you stay over, you eat all of my food. Yeah, you mess up all my towels...," and when I first heard that, I wondered, "Who wrote that because I know that it wasn't MARINA." Sure enough, MARINA confirmed recently on Instagram that that particular line was penned by the song's co-writer Alex Hope (who also co-wrote Troye Sivan's song "Lucky Strike" as well as nearly all of his Blue Neighbourhood album - another shared co-writer between MARINA and Troye).
LOVE + FEAR closes with the ballad "Soft to Be Strong," which I think would have sounded a lot better with "Too Afraid" preceding it rather than "No More Suckers" (meaning that, in my opinion, "Too Afraid" and "No More Suckers" should have been switched). I also think that, given the song's lyrical content, it would have made more sense on LOVE, and "Baby" would have made more sense on FEAR, so those two songs should have been switched (although not in their respective places, since "Baby" would make a terrible album closer). The song references the album title multiple times: "I know that when love is lost, it's only fear in disguise... I choose to love you without fear," which makes it a great closing track for the album overall, but the thesis of the song is summed up in this line: "I found out love has to be soft to be strong," ultimately making the song more about love than it is about fear. Many of the song's lyrics also seem to parallel the Electra Heart closing song "Fear and Loathing," which I think has an overall similar takeaway. In "Fear and Loathing," MARINA sings, "I live my life in bitterness and fill my heart with emptiness, and now I see, I see it for the first time, there is no crime in being kind. Not everyone is out to screw you over; maybe, oh just maybe, they just want to get to know you." Here in "Soft to Be Strong," she sings, "I know it hurts to be kind... And I made myself believe other people wanted to hurt me. I took my bitterness and made it sweet." That parallels are, to me, incredibly strong which is why I have come to think of the two songs as sister songs. I strongly relate to the song because it's about not allowing heartbreak and loss to harden you, and the line "Somebody hurt me long ago, and though to heal a heart is slow, it's just a consequence of pain" especially resonates with me. I overall like LOVE + FEAR, but it's definitely, in my opinion, MARINA's weakest album so far, not only because of the aforementioned reasons but also because it lacks the tight focus that her past albums feature, not only musically but lyrically as well. The album is musically all over the place, and the lyrics, despite the album's title and the unique packaging strategy of dividing the album into two conceptual halves, lack an overall theme. After Madonna released her 2012 album MDNA (which suffers from a similar problem of lacking an overall theme), a friend of mine and I developed a recurring joke, which was that Madonna released the album and said, "Here are some songs," and this kind of feels like MARINA's "here are some songs" album. It very likely still has some growing on me to do, but I think that it's unlikely that that opinion will change much. Don't get me wrong - saying that LOVE + FEAR is my least favorite MARINA album isn't really saying much because it's still MARINA and still better than 90% of the other pop albums that I hear nowadays. It's just that while most of the songs by themselves are fantastic, they do little to come together and form a cohesive album.
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